I’ve read every single message because backwards compatibility in Ruby 1.8.7 is something that I do not fully understand. It all started with this comment in Jaime’s blog. There, Jaime wondered if Ubuntu did the right thing by updating Ruby to 1.8.7, even if that version breaks rails (in fact, it did). Well, in this case, my humble opinion was yes, Ubuntu did well by updating Ruby. But now, let’s consider other things.

So far, I’ve seen two kind of complains against Ruby 1.8.7:

Coding working in 1.8.6 that doesn’t work in 1.8.7. I’ve been talking James Coglan about it, and the one of the errors was that his code relied on the order of the keys in a hash. But, there are other he hasn’t been able to fix, and is something regarding regular expression. I am unhappy with this kind of “new features”.

Other people is complaining about working code in 1.8.7 that does not work in 1.8.6. I really understand them, because they program really cool gems and they have to test if they have used not-valid-1.8.6 code. I wouldn’t care too much about but we must keep in mind that 1.8.7 is a minor release.

Finally, I just want to say that, as many people has pointed out before me, it would be better to migrate to 1.9.1. Common! It has been already released! Anyway, that’s not the point of the discussion. It is all about a minor release with too many changes (I’m not talking about bugfixes). Do I like the new things? Yes, I do (except some that I cannot really understand). Am I happy with Ruby 1.8.7? No, I’m not because it is suppose to be a minor version release and it is making too much noise.